Oscar the Grouch
Oscar is a green furry Grouch who lives in a trash can near Big Bird's nest on Sesame Street. In fact, he loves trash so much that he's rarely seen outside of his trash can. His trademark song, explaining his passion for refuse, is "I Love Trash".In the first few years of Sesame Street, he was orange, then in Season 2, he became green like he still is today. Origins According to Sesame Street Unpaved, "The character of Oscar was inspired by a nasty waiter from a restaurant called Oscar's Tavern in Manhattan. Jim Henson and Jon Stone were waited on by a man who was so rude and grouchy that he surpassed annoying and started to actually amuse both Jim and Jon. They were so entertained that going to Oscar's Tavern became a sort of masochistic form of luncheon entertainment for them, and their waiter forever became immortalized as the world's most famous Grouch." In the Ask Henson.com web column, Jim Henson Company Archivist Karen Falk said that the restaurant was named Oscar's Salt of the Sea -- and went on to say, "Some of the designs that we have in the Archives were done by Jim Henson on Oscar's paper placemats!" Caroll Spinney says that he based Oscar's voice on another New York resident -- a Bronx taxi driver who drove him to work on his first day performing the character. When Spinney got into the cab, the driver snapped, "Where to, Mac?"1 While Jim Henson's first Oscar sketches were colored purple, the original Oscar puppet was orange (Henson later said in an interview that this change was made because the early cameras weren't good enough to capture the color right2). In chapter nine of the book The Wisdom of Big Bird, Caroll Spinney states that the Oscar puppet was rebuilt about a month after Sesame Street had started taping. Jim tore apart the original puppet, and a new puppet was built. An early version of the green Oscar debuted on The Flip Wilson Show in 1970 and Oscar's explanation for that was that he had vacationed at Swamp Mushy Muddy, where the dampness had turned him green overnight. In a 2003 appearance, Oscar stated that while his time in Swamp Mushy Muddy made him appear green, he is still in fact orange underneath all the slime and mold. (With an exception, he's just never taken a bath).3 In his introduction to the book Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street (which also contained his lunch from yesterday, grape juice, and something unidentifiable), he explains how he ended up on Sesame Street, saying he was a normal when Joan Ganz Cooney and Jon Stone decided to create the show, they hired Jim Henson, who bugged him until he agreed to be on the show for the first episode only. He headed off to Swamp Mushy Muddy after the production wrapped, disgusted, but discovered that his agent, Bernie, had signed a contract to have him on the entire run of Sesame Street. Oscar became so mad he that he turned green (a fictous explanation around how he became green), but figured the show wouldn't run for more than six months anyway (obviously disappointed). Oscar explained his family roots and fur color again in a Life Magazine article in 2009, "Most of the family was orange. But I had a lovely vacation in Swamp Mushy Muddy resort. It was so dark and dreary I kind of turned green. It's mostly moss. I like it — it goes with my eyes. I accidentally took a bath once, turned orange again and washed all the moss off, so I went right back to Swamp Mushy Muddy, and here I am.4" Oscar's first line on Sesame Street, in episode 0001, was "Don't bang on my can! Go away." This sums up his personality as it would remain for over 40 years. Category:Sesame Street Characters